


halcyon

by ndnickerson



Category: Justified
Genre: Christmas, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-20
Updated: 2012-12-20
Packaged: 2017-11-21 16:53:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,528
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/600006
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ndnickerson/pseuds/ndnickerson
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Rachel tracks a missing witness into Noble's Hollow. The trick is getting her back out again.</p>
            </blockquote>





	halcyon

**Author's Note:**

  * For [lollard](https://archiveofourown.org/users/lollard/gifts).



> Thanks so much to norgbelulah for her help!

Rachel Brooks meticulously cleans her desk every Friday afternoon. As soon as she sees the single sheet of paper on her desk blotter Monday morning, before she's even finished her first cup of coffee, she scowls. Raylan's desk is a scatter of incident reports so well-thumbed the corners have curled and smudged; he's out on admin leave for the next few days and Rachel's too weary to really remember what brought it on this time. She's preoccupied by a dozen other things, and the pumpkin pie spiced coffee definitely isn't enough to make up for it, especially not after she's read the sheet of paper marring her otherwise uncomplicated morning.

Harlan. Harlan at Christmas.

\--

Lexington's different. The spindly trees lining the streets gleam and twinkle with small white lights starting at dusk, and the shop window displays are all full of cotton batting, dustings of glittery artificial snow, red and white Santa hats and paper snowflakes.

Harlan is a world away, and not the vintage-Christmas-card, old-fashioned way. Half the shop windows downtown are empty, abandoned so long that the panes are smeared with almost greasy dust. Some of the streetlamps sputter and click to themselves at night. The holiday decorations affixed to the light poles are a ratty faded tinsel. A few yards sport inflatables tethered to dead beige grass, oversized snowmen and camouflage-clad Santas bobbing gently in the breeze beside rusty trailers.

Christmas, at least the electric icicle version, seems to exist solely for night. In the stillness it would be almost beautiful, but Rachel is not still; she's feeling at her waist for her sidearm as she negotiates the turn onto the gravel excuse for a driveway.

Her witness, Kandi Bowman, had been living with her older half-sister. Now Kandi's missing, but Rachel only knows because she called Kandi's workplace and found out she's missed her last three shifts.

Rachel takes notes, but they are few, and all her visit does is reinforce her first impression of the place. LaDonna's sullen, almost mulish expression, and the wide-eyed gazes of her three children, the impact of fists in the drywall, the litter of beer bottles on the countertop tell it better than she herself ever would. LaDonna's latest boyfriend isn't so much of a catch, and Kandi is seventeen, old enough to be by herself, and she at least could leave. With only the clothes on her back, though, if LaDonna's cursory glance around Kandi's room and her drawled pronouncement that no clothes are missing can be taken as fact. If Kandi's by herself she hasn't gone far, but if she organized her escape with a boyfriend, it's been three days and she could be anywhere.

But this is Harlan, and Rachel wouldn't be surprised if stepping over the county line had given Kandi such a pain that she'd _had_ to return. Harlan digs like ragged nails into the skin, and even if she hadn't known that before, Raylan is the clearest proof of it she's ever seen. The longer he's been in their office, walking with his ghosts again, the farther back he seems to slide.

By lunchtime, after she's checked with a few more people, Rachel's pretty sure she knows where Kandi is.

Walking with her own ghosts.

\--

The Hollow.

Harlan isn't walking back in time, not really. Harlan is just a small piece of the sad world, more honest about it than most. The Hollow, though, _does_ feel like going back in time, like crossing the boundary into some forbidden place, and while Rachel doesn't feel uncomfortable there—she's been in worse places, although she hasn't yet held a man's warm palm in her slipping grasp as he bled out on the floor. She hasn't done that yet.

She doesn't feel uncomfortable. But for a while she didn't understand the women who came here, who were swallowed by the watchful silence. Rachel had seen it as weakness, but some of the women who come here take every bit of strength they have to walk out the door, choosing whether or not to leave the kids behind, choosing to walk out instead of facing another day of concealing bruises with tentative swipes of their makeup, instead of uncapping a fresh one, doing another line or two, popping another pill. In the Hollow, those things fade away.

And Rachel knows, God, she knows, that staying and believing despite all evidence to the contrary has left more women twisted and bruised, insensible to their husbands' remorseful tears and apologies, than the alternative.

Kandi has to have some reason to have vanished, to have come here, instead of coming to Rachel, and Rachel just hopes she isn't too late, that no one has permanently silenced her witness before she could make it to the safety of the Hollow. And the men who underestimate the protection afforded by the Hollow are soon disabused of that notion.

The single concession Ellstin Limehouse has made to the holiday is a faded red felt bow on the front porch railing, so unassuming that Rachel's not even sure it hasn't always been there. She touches the handle of her gun before walking in.

Rachel doesn't believe in ghosts, and never has, but she can only imagine how many would linger in these walls, in the slaughterhouse, if they survived.

"I'm looking for a missing girl," Rachel announces to the room at large. Too many of the men are hunched in prison-meal posture, their gazes locked on their plates, protectively encircling their space. Even so, Rachel flashes the enlarged head shot of Kandi, keeping her voice low and even. "She's not in any trouble; she's just a witness."

The snigger isn't so much spoken as felt. She's heard the phrase before. _Snitches get stitches._ But even the code of this place trumps that unspoken one. They won't give her up.

And they can have her, as far as Rachel's concerned. The sheer gunpower and silent watchfulness in this room alone would be enough to keep Kandi safe, and once the trial's finished, she could bury herself here, wrapping herself in the strength of those women who came before her.

After a wasted afternoon, Rachel takes the bridge road out of the Hollow and heads back to the office. She hasn't lost a witness; she knows exactly where Kandi is. The tricky part will be getting her _out_ before the trial starts.

At least the Hollow keeps its ghosts quiet. Rachel can't even imagine going against any of them, in a fair fight or on the stand. They may not always keep entirely out of trouble, but they handle it themselves.

It makes the hairs on the back of her neck stand up, but Rachel learned a long time ago that fixing the world was beyond her. Her blotter is clean, and at least that's something.

Or it is, until Art calls her in and tells her that a special prosecutor is coming in, and Kandi will need to come in first thing Wednesday morning.

And Rachel will need to find someone who's dug herself into any of a thousand holes and pulled it in behind her.

\--

It's cold, but Cass Evans doesn't invite Rachel in. She stares at her through the screen door, the kind that Rachel can already hear, practically feel slapping with a cold finality into the frame when it's released. Rachel's wrapped in a black wool peacoat with her hands jammed in her pockets, balanced on the low heels of her black boots. She doesn't have time to pretend she is other than she is; she just needs Kandi's cooperation for a few more days. And Kandi has to know Rachel's looking for her. News of the outside trying to get in spreads quick as dread here.

Cass's eyes are cold and watchful.

Rachel doesn't sigh. She just purses her lips a little and shifts the head shot she's holding between her fingers. And Cass just as solidly ignores it.

"If you see her, give her my card. Please."

There's no use in appealing to her as a woman or any other way Rachel can. Here she's just a badge. Cass makes no effort to open the screen door, even wide enough to admit the width of Rachel's heavy-bond business card. Rachel leaves it in the cold metal mailbox beside the door, and she isn't even off the porch, the slats worn through the gunmetal grey paint to show the heart of the greying wood, before she hears the deadbolt being driven into place behind her.

The house, a rambling two-story farmhouse, half the windows patched with flapping rectangles of transparent tarp, reminds her of one not far from where she grew up. The yard was always overgrown, and feral tabby cats slunk through it, searching for the inevitable mice. Rumor was that the old sour-faced woman who lived there alone lured children in every Halloween, then turned them into cat food. Rachel remembers listening to that, refusing to believe it, and just as vehemently refusing to say so.

She'll never find Kandi here unless Kandi wants to be found. She could bang on every door in the entire community until the men with cold eyes and sawed-off shotguns showed up, and Rachel isn't Raylan; Rachel has no intention of dying in an easily-avoided firefight. The special prosecutor is welcome to come find Kandi if he wants her.

Rachel leaves the Hollow to grab lunch at a roadside restaurant. A yellowed Pepsi-Cola sign hangs out front, and years of cigarette smoke have climbed the faded wallpaper, leaving it dirty and discolored. The greasy consolation hamburger Rachel orders is better than it has any right to be, and she salves her conscience with a side salad, the kind that came straight out of a bag in the kitchen.

Idly Rachel takes out her phone and places three consecutive calls to Kandi's cell phone, the same as she's been doing practically every hour since she walked into the office Monday morning. She's just swallowed the last bite of her hamburger when the call actually connects.

"Yeah?" Kandi answers, panting.

\--

Rachel makes the deal under one condition. The prosecutor isn't happy, but he accepts Rachel's apologies as she says Kandi's down with a particularly nasty case of the flu and she won't be able to make it in until she feels better. Art isn't happy either, but Art's also been popping antacids more often, and when Raylan makes it in, his jaw is lined in a week's worth of stubble and his gaze is locked somewhere far, far away.

The gas station is the old kind. No credit card machines at the pumps and prepay is on the honor system. The pumps glug and tremble to themselves as the drivers wrestle them into place and start them. Rachel picks over the honey-bun selection and considers buying a pack of sunflower seeds, slapping a red self-adhesive bow on it and leaving it on Tim's desk, when a maroon Continental pulls up, and Rachel's hand is immediately on the butt of her gun.

Kandi strides briskly over the cracked pavement to the glass door at the front of the store, and a tarnished bell clatters against the frame to announce her arrival. The heels of her hands are tucked up into the cuffs of her sweatshirt, and it takes Rachel a few more seconds to recognize her; they've only met three times, and Kandi's lip is swollen and split.

Kandi pays for a cold soda as Rachel glances over at the perpetual coffeepot. The smell of burnt old grounds hangs in the air.

"I had a favor to pay back. A debt." Kandi winces when the lip of her soda bottle touches her sore lip. "I'm almost done."

Rachel has no response; the unspoken name hangs heavy in the air between them, and it's a battle Rachel could win if she so chose, but oh, so much blood has been spilled onto this cold earth. And this is a small thing.

"You have to keep in touch, Kandi."

She makes a note of the Continental's license plate number anyway, fully knowing that it will do her no good.

\--

It's Saturday night when she gets the call, and while Rachel knows there's no point in her going out, she does anyway.

Ava Crowder is serving paper cups of coffee to the first responders who mill around the trailers behind Audrey's. Her expression is genial enough when it meets Rachel's, but the wariness in her eyes would be unique only by its absence.

It was a terrible mistake. That's the story. That's how the lieutenant of the man Kandi's testifying against was found sprawled across dirty patterned sheets in the bedroom of one of the trailers, five deep stab wounds in his chest and a bullet embedded in the opposite wall, a long-legged jittery bottle-blonde named Morgan sobbing as she explains again and again that she can't remember what happened; she went to a friend's trailer to borrow a drink before she went to her trailer, and somehow, in the ten minutes that took, the client ended up dead...

Rachel doesn't want to do it, but she pulls out the head shot anyway. Art will ask and Rachel likes her Monday mornings as calm as possible.

"Seen this girl hanging around here recently, by chance?"

Ava shakes her head, her sharp eyes inscrutable. "Like some coffee before you go, Marshal?" she asks, raising an eyebrow.

Rachel doesn't bother looking at the crime scene, and ballistics will just show it's a bullet from the gun found by his side, and the knife was left buried in his chest and wiped clean of prints. The clothes have been stripped off and disposed of by now, and in the grey light of Sunday morning Ava will see if she can flip the mattress and forget it all.

There are other ways to deal with ghosts, after all.

\--

Monday morning. Rachel takes a sip of pumpkin pie spiced coffee before walking off the elevator. She looks at Art's office windows before she glances at her blotter; while the lights are on, she doesn't see his silhouette in there.

One folder on her otherwise tidy blotter. Preliminary crime scene report. Everyone wants to just get through today, or half of today, to get away from all this tomorrow, to spend time just _away_ from it. A small fiber-optic tree topped with a gleaming red satin bow stands in the conference room, casting soothing patterns of light on the walls.

Just another body in another trailer. Just another dead end, cold trail, fresh ghost.

The split lip has gone down, and Rachel can hardly see it under Kandi's makeup. Her suit looks like it's ten years old and a size too big for her, but she's seventeen and in that fact is all the sympathy the jury will need.

"I'm ready."

Sometimes women come back from the Hollow sharper, stronger. And sometimes they never come back at all.

Rachel hopes for her sake that Kandi never needs to go back.

She picks up the phone to call the prosecutor. "So let's get this done."


End file.
